I'm sorry xxpcwizardxx, but my experience playing WoW for years at 300+ms lag was significantly different. And it was due to network latency. Bioware, at least in the public statements they made prior to the APAC release, must have agree with this, as they said that they couldn't provided an acceptable game experience for our region without local servers. And a word of advice - if you wish to avoid starting flame wars, perhaps using less inflammatory language might assist.

Hello Eric. Just a few questions: 1) When are you actually going to inform your customers about this change? You haven't put up any information anywhere but this thread - you have relied on little more than word-of-mouth to let customers know. If today a new customer was to sign up for a 6 month subscription, would you inform them about the imminent degradation in service and give them the opportunity to reconsider their purchase? What is going to be you policy regarding refunds for customers who feel that the game is now unplayable? 2) Back prior to the APAC release, we were told that the SW:TOR was not going to be released in our region because Bioware felt that we wouldn't have an acceptable play-experience without local servers. You are now telling us that the best possible play-experience is to move us to NA servers. Have Bioware actually changed anything of a technical nature to improve our experience, or have you just dropped your standards? 3) Back when you made your announcement I queried what criteria you were using to assess the impact of the increased latency. I expressed my concerns that, with the increase in latency it won't just be my game-experience will be degraded, but it may be detrimental to anyone I was grouped with as well. For example, if I was healing Hardmode Lost Island or Directive 7, where frequent movements are required to react to semi-random events, I could have the feeling that the extra 300ms latency that I will experience will result in reducing my ability to heal the group be diminished. This will affect everyone in the group. At what latency does Bioware think that an average SW:TOR player should just give up trying to run each level of difficulty, because they will just be penalising everyone in the group?

From memory, the jump across the Pacific from the east coast of Australia to the US is around 150ms, so if you've got 175ms that's really good in Australia. From WA (where I am) there's another approx 50ms to get from the west coast to east coast. I'm not sure what it is for NZ to the US, but I'd guess it would be around 100ms. That's before we add in the jumps between ISPs on either side. Not much we can do about that Pacific ocean bit, since there's only one route, other than build our own high speed gaming link through the centre of the Earth. At that point it would probably be cheaper to buy EA and make them keep the APAC servers.

I agree with with you soneil. The communication strategy at the moment leaves a lot to be desired. While I hope that this all turns out to be some early April Fool's day joke, I know that it's not the case and have to accept that I either have to live with the massively increased latency or quit the game. Better communication from EA would help a lot in this case. In case Eric or anyone else from the community team is still bother to read this, here are some things that would help us to know: There still has been no official communication about the changes other than the forum post. This adds to the perception that they are trying to hide the decision. Letting their customers know is important. Approximately what time frame are we talking about? Weeks? Months? If the forced move is not for a few months, then those of us who do find the lag on US servers unacceptable may still be able to get through the expansion content that we pre-ordered. It's been stated that Bioware has tested the higher latency we will get once the move has gone through and found it acceptable. Could you please give us more information. At what ping does it become unacceptable? And what does acceptable mean? There's quite a bit of difference between "a pro-gamer with a max gear character who has the encounter perfectly memorized didn't go so badly that the group wiped on a story-mode flashpoint at 200ms ping" and "average gamer being able to complete the final boss on a HM with the recommend level of gear after a half-dozen goes at 400ms ping". Is there anything being done to help mitigate the latency increase? Are you implementing a tunneling service to help reduce the lag? Are you implementing something similar to the Quartz add on for WoW, which gives an latency indicator on the casting bar to give you a 'best guess' on when to start your next action. Giving everyone connecting above a certain ping time a free Alacrity buff to pull down their activation times ? Stating what the refund policy that Billing Support is using instead of leaving it up to individuals to find it out for themselves. The reason this would help is because, right now, all they have done is create the prospect that we may find that our game experience will decrease to personally unacceptable levels at some unknown time in the future. By giving more information, we would be able to make informed decisions instead of us having to base our decision to continue to subscribe based on our gut feelings. I made a character Begeren Colony (where my characters are going to end up) last night and had my concerns about how high the ping would be confirmed. I was getting 360ms while on Tython - so roughly speaking it looks like I will be getting a 0.3s delay on all actions over what I get on Gav Daragon. From my past experiences in WoW, which had similar ping times, I am now concerned that I will see a similar level of problems with any game action requiring timing. In WoW, I found that when I started using the Quartz add-on which helped give a much better idea of when I should be sending a command, helping to reduce the effects of lag, I found my DPS & healing went up by ~15-20%. If I do 20% worse in SWToR once I have to move to Begeren Colony, will I have the right to pull a group down by that much? I don't want to cause the group to fail because of me. As it stands right now, the only way I could find this out is to wait to the transfer and then try run something like the final fight of HM Directive 7 and see what happens. My subscription expires in a month. Given all the uncertainty I'm not sure if I should just give up now and seek a refund for my pre-order of RotHC. I'd still be just as disappointed as I would if I wait around, try the move and find that my fears are confirmed, but at least I'd have a bit more money to go towards finding a replacement to SWToR. The current communication strategy isn't making this easy.

Hello again Eric. While the above address some of the concerns your APAC customers have, it does not address the primary concerns raised in this thread. Your failure to even mention the other concerns is disheartening and does nothing to calm your affected customers nor increase your trustworthiness. The ping time issue and the name related issues are so concerning to your customers because you are taking something away that they currently have - which is worse than never having it. You are "altering the bargain" and your customers are not simply going to "pray you don't alter it further". Secondly, the fact that this decision is still hidden in the forums does EA/Bioware no credit. Your messages in these forums are still the only official announcement of your plans. As I stated yesterday, you need to inform all your APAC customers about the change. It will affect customers' decision to renew subscriptions so you should inform them immediately. Thirdly, you should make a statement with regards to EA/Bioware's refund policy regarding the change. There will be customers seeking refunds; the more hoops you make them jump through, the more irate they will get, with proportionally more negative blow-back from this decision. I would think that EA would be looking to avoid this, given other events this month.

Hello Eric. Couple of points, both relating to communication. Firstly, while you may have raised this in the forums, I'm sure you know that not all customers participate in the forums. For example, this is the first time I've posted since I had an issue back at the APAC launch. So by only only asking for opinions on the forums would not have reached everyone playing on the APAC servers and would have not been able to find out their preferred option. Therefore, your claim that transfers to US servers was the preferred option of your APAC customers is not on solid ground. I occasionally read the forums and never saw the survey. Secondly, you haven't actually informed your APAC customers of this decision, except via a forum post. I haven't received a email informing me of the change; you haven't put a notice on the launch screen. Given that you are significantly altering the service you are providing and that your subscribing customers pay in advance for that service, I believe that you should be informing them as soon as possible so they can make an informed decision about continuing to subscribe. As for my personal view on this announcement: I've really enjoyed playing SW:ToR for the past year. It's helped me get through some tough times. One of the nice things was that my ping times were not 200-400 ms behind the majority of players, like it is in WoW. In WoW, the extra lag does affect performance, which affects not just myself but those of my group, in both PvP and PvE play. I haven't played SW:ToR on the US servers, but if the effect of the additional lag is the same as it is in WoW, then I will have to seriously reconsider my continued subscription. I don't want to be a drag on my team so I'm not sure I'll be able to continue playing in groups, which leads me to consider if it is worth continuing my subscription.